My coat was born in the Lebow Clothing Factory in 1985, shortly before the owner closed it down, firing several hundred seamstresses and quietly knocking away one of the last bastions of manufacturing that stood in the way of Baltimore's inevitable transformation into a post-industrial wasteland. The factory was closed, locked, and boarded up, and no one bothered to remove anything from inside. Endless rows of sewing machines sat rusting, great hay-bale sized rolls of textile lay collecting dust, and this coat, along with twelve thousand of its brethren, hung neatly wrapped in plastic, unseen and forgotten. Like the women who made it, it became redundant, unwanted, a discarded relic of a dying era...